Tuesday’s Tools – Saving an Image from Seeking Michigan

There are a host of professional genealogists who offer tips, shortcuts and tricks to make life easier for the rest of us. Along the way, each of us picks up tidbits of knowledge which help us survive, or at least become our own standard way of accomplishing tasks. Once in a while, when I feel like it, in very irregular fashion, but almost always on Tuesday, I will tell you how I do something related to my genealogy. If this little effort helps you, share with others, so they can be helped to. We all have a little something in our heads that can make life easier for others. One warning: I am a PC user, and I know nothing about Apple, Mac or Linux operating systems and/or computers. This is from a PC user, for PC users.

Today’s tool is a method I used to save, rather than print, records on Seeking Michigan [www.seekingmichigan.org]. I usually prefer to save files, rather than print them, and Seeking Michigan does not have a “save” button.

I conducted a search, and am using my great-grandmother, Lena Yearnd. Here is the result of searching for “Yearnd”.

I bet you wish you had an unusual last name now, don’t you? Clicking on the image produces this:

I have some choices, but saving the image is not among them. Darn. I click the “printable version” link and see this:

Here is the trick, click cancel instead of print, and the print box vanishes, leaving just the image. You can see only part of it, but do not worry. Right click on the image and select “save as” from the shortcut menu:

Here is Lena’s death record on my desktop where I saved it:

If you are as crazy as me, you won’t want to have the record with the thick black border. That huge black border is another reason not to print, it prints out, too. Just open the image in your favorite photo editing program, and then crop off the black. Some of the images on the site are slightly crooked, you can also straighten if needed.

Here is a link to the resulting file, and nice clean version of my great-grandmother’s death certificate. If you know of any Detman/Detmann families in Michigan between 1870 and 1920, please contact me. Although I have no evidence Lena immigrated with her family, one never knows.

I keep thinking, I could put the original documents I have into one or two notebooks, if I trashed all the hard copies of census and other things. It would really increase my shelf space, which I could use for the new photo albums I am assembling as I scan all my photos. Maybe next winter?

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